Status of Women committee  Certainly. I'll speak to sex tourism, and if I may, I'd like to defer the other questions to Hiroko. Particularly relating to sex tourism, I think one of the great things that this House has done is to enact laws that allow for the criminal prosecution of Canadian pedophiles who

Status of Women committee  Excellent question. The issue goes beyond actual awareness, because as I travel and speak across the country, I think many Canadians, especially the younger generation, are quite aware of some of the international situations relating to slave labour or cocoa or coffee or these s

Status of Women committee  What you have to assess is the power structure that allows the perpetrators to prevail over the vulnerable. Generally speaking, as the root cause, somebody's pockets are being lined; somebody is profiting from the exploitation of these vulnerable women and children. It would cert

Status of Women committee  Yes, if I might. Certainly sex trafficking is exacerbated by poverty and economic desperation, but we do not find, in our experience, epidemic levels of sex trafficking whenever we find poverty in the world. You'll see endemic levels of poverty in different countries and differen

Status of Women committee  It's a very good question. Obviously, it could be somewhat presumptive for me to do this, lacking the interaction I've had with some of these individuals. Through interaction with individuals who have been trafficked, specifically the ones we have rescued from some very horrific

Status of Women committee  I think there's a vulnerability in taking that approach. It would almost be like trying to gather up after a dandelion has gone to seed and has blown across our country. You'd be picking up the fragments of the aftermath, rather than rooting out these networks of trafficking and

Status of Women committee  Thank you for asking me to testify before the Committee today. My name is Jamie McIntosh and I am the Executive Director of International Justice Mission Canada. In its myriad forms, human trafficking is an egregious assault on human rights, human dignity, and human freedom. On